Art & Creativity Quote by Paul Auster

Auster’s line is a casual shrug with a craftsman’s agenda: defuse the prestige panic that flares whenever literature gets fed to Hollywood. The surface argument is pragmatic - adaptation doesn’t retroactively “damage” a book - but the real move is status management. He name-checks Hemingway like a literary vaccine: if the macho saint of American letters survived the camera, everyone else can stop clutching pearls.

The syntax does a lot of work. “I don’t know if she should worry too much” sounds like modesty, but it’s also a power play: he positions anxiety as slightly unserious, a self-inflicted wound. Then he slips into a soft, cumulative logic (“I mean… lots of…”) that mimics conversation, not manifesto. That tone matters. Auster isn’t defending film as art so much as refusing the melodrama of purity. Books are not fragile relics; they’re objects with their own immune system: readers.

The subtext is also about authorship and control. Adaptations trigger a familiar dread: a novelist’s private architecture gets remodeled into something louder and simpler. Auster’s reassurance implies an older, tougher idea of the canon: the book’s authority is not democratic, not up for vote, not threatened by a bad casting choice. If the movie flops, the novel remains itself.

Contextually, it’s a postwar writer speaking from inside a media ecosystem where cultural value is constantly translated - into screenplays, brand identities, “content.” Auster’s quiet counsel is to treat that translation as noise, not verdict. The book isn’t competing with the film; it’s outlasting it.